Antelope Canyon

Trip Notes: We Play the Slots: Antelope Canyon At Last

I'm a bit of a slot canyon nut, and that's something you can't get in
California. When we were in
Jasper
I dragged Dave to all the amazing
slot canyons there. The ones in Jasper are very different from
southwestern canyons: the water is a weird blue-green from the fine
particles in suspension which come from glacial melt, and the rock is
shades of grey with none of the reds you see in the southwest.
A goal for this trip was to see some of the slot canyons of the
Colorado Plateau.

Antelope Canyon, near Page AZ, is the famous slot canyon that you've
seen in a million photos. It's located on Navajo land, and it's so
popular that in addition to requiring a permit (like all access to
Indian land) access is also allowed only on guided tours, presumably
to control the number of visitors and try to keep the damage to a
minimum. Dave and I aren't much for guided tours, so we'd avoided
Antelope Canyon in past visits, but I really wanted to see it so Dave
graciously put up with it.

Several tour companies run out of Page, or it turns out you can also
drive out to the gate, and sometimes the Navajo run their own tours
from there. That sounded more low-key and direct, so we decided to
try that approach, and it worked out fine. Cost is about the same --
a little cheaper if you drive to the site, but not enough that it
makes a huge difference. We did have to wait around for 45 minutes or
so, which might not have been necessary with a scheduled tour, but the
tour guide was low-key (you didn't have to stay with the group if you
didn't want to) and interesting (we did stay to listen to his spiel,
and he had some interesting things to say, and he still left us plenty
of time to wander back on our own and take photos).

The most interesting thing he told us concerned the floor level, which
earlier this year was about five feet higher than where we stood.
The flash floods which race through Antelope Canyon and carve out its
lovely features also move a great deal of sand, and the floor level
changes dramatically depending on the nature of the past year's
floods. It tuns out this year had some killer floods and washed out a
lot of the sand which normally comprises the floor, so the canyon was
about at its deepest point when we were there.

The canyon was exactly as advertised in almost all respects. It's
beautiful: it looks exactly like all the photographs you've seen, and
if you use a tripod (more on that later), your photos come out looking
like that too. Neat! It was as advertised in other respects, too:
Dave had heard that Antelope Canyon was like taking photographs in
Tokyo subway, and that, too, was exactly right. Even in late October
the canyon was full of people, ninety percent of whom are setting up
tripods in the middle of the path at any given moment and looking
impatient at all the other people getting in the way of their photos.
I hate to think what it's like at the height of the tourist season
when the big light rays are happening.

About tripods: at one point I was semi-serious about photography, but
I'm more casual about it now. I've been shooting digital, and I don't
like the big zillion-dollar-zillion-pound auto-everything wonders that
you have to buy to get a digital SLR (if I'm going to use an SLR I
want control over everything, so why lug ten extra pounds around and
pay $3k for features I'm never going to use?) so now I just use
point-and-shoot digital cameras and try to get the best I can out of
them (which is a fun challenge in itself). I have a nice 10x
ultra-zoom camera, but since I knew light levels were low in the
canyon (the townie tours recommend ISO 800 film for handheld shots,
the Navajo recommend 400, and digicam CCDs are really noisy operating
even at 400 -- you don't want to take art shots at that setting if you
can help it) I left the heavy ultra-zoom behind and took my tiny new
lightweight credit card sized Minolta Dimage Xt with a lightweight plastic
backpacking "UltraPod" (one of those 3" foldup jobs: not the ones made out
of metal coils, which haven't worked very well for me, but the stiff
plastic type). The tripod and camera case all hang off my water
bottle strap and don't weigh enough that I even notice the extra
weight (including two spare batteries, and today, for the first time,
I used all three.) Dave had a similar setup, with the slightly
heavier Canon Elph.

This setup evoked an audible sniff from one of our fellow tour-goers as
he scoped out everybody's equipment (oohing over the medium format rig
one fellow was bringing). I found this somewhat amusing.

As it turns out, mini plastic tripods work very well in highly
trafficked slot canyons. While everyone else is crowded at one spot
jostling each other as they adjust their tripod legs to the perfect
height to see over the camera next to them, you can mosey on by,
holding your camera-attached-to-tripod, find a spot that looks good,
set the camera to self-timer mode (to get around camera shake from
lack of a cable release), hold the tripod firmly against a wall and
adjust the ball head until the angle is right (you pretty much have to
use the viewscreen, not the optical viewfinder, so this is battery
intensive and that's why I used up two full batteries and started on
the third), lock it down, fire the shutter button then keep holding
the tripod firmly until the self timer finishes counting down and the
time exposure fires. You do need a camera that can do reasonable time
exposures (that had been a factor when I chose the Minolta: it can't
do really long exposures, only up to 4 seconds, but that's long enough
for most slot canyon shots without needing ISO 400). The Minolta's
self timer isn't settable -- ten seconds only -- so occasionally
someone walks into the frame before the countdown fires, but actually
having moving people in the frame can make for an interesting picture
(a few times I even went for that intentionally) so I didn't worry
about that too much.

Occasionally (rarely) I actually set the tripod down on the ground,
but the first time I did that I regretted it: the tripod tipped over
and the camera fell lens first into the sand. I blew all the visible
sand out right away, and found and blew out a few more grains later,
but for the rest of the day it had problems opening or closing its
lens cover. We'll see if that problem eventually straightens itself
out or not.

The hour was over too quickly and we headed back to the parking lot.
The guide gave us an option on another slot canyon (unguided),
Rattlesnake, for a small extra fee, but we'd heard about another
canyon we wanted to check out, so we declined the Rattlesnake option.